Yahoo! Blogs/News mashup

The first few weeks I have spent at Yahoo! have been extremely exciting. In the course of a week Yahoo! has announced the Berkeley Research Lab (where I work), a new podcasting service, the acquisition of Upcoming and tonight Yahoo! Blog Search the integration of weblogs into Yahoo! News Search results. I am extremely happy to have had the chance to be part of what I think will be an important step in bringing blogs into a new context.

The decision to join news and weblogs instead of creating yet another vertical blog search is something that I’m sure will fuel a lot of blog posts, especially around the issue of whether or not the marriage is appropriate. Personally I see this not as a statement of some kind of equivalency, but rather as an acknowledgement of the goals that drive a person to go searching for news in the first place. But that’s just me.

And, as Jeremy has pointed out, a huge motivation comes from a desire to bring blogs to a wider audience, which in the case of Yahoo! News is umm… really wide. I’ve only been at Yahoo! for a few weeks (long enough to start! adding! extra! punctuation!), but I’m very lucky to have had the chance to work with this team during the final stages of development. This is, in fact, the only product I’ve ever had a hand in, and it has been facinating to see it take on it’s final form. It’s not something I have seen very often in the academic world, that is for sure.